ISIS Soldiers Instructed to Rape Women to Make Them Muslim: Report

ISIS soldiers are reportedly being encouraged to rape women, with instructions that a non-Muslim woman who is raped by 10 ISIS soldiers will automatically become a member of the faith.CNN reported that a woman kidnapped by ISIS, identified as "Noor" for the story, said her captor showed her a letter that told the soldiers to use rape to convert women to follow Allah. The note had an ISIS flag on it and a photo of the group's leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, Noor said.

In Mosul, Iraq, CNN reported that ISIS soldiers were excited at the idea of a "female sex slave market" where they could "buy" Yazidi girls and women. The Yazidis are a people who blend Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and other ancient religions into their practices — making them a prime target for militants.

"They took our girls, our homes, and our families," Yazidi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh told CNN. "They took all of them. We say our fruitful generation is our children, but they took them all, young and old."

"We are not seeking to be sensational but to establish the stages of the criminal process for each category of the Yazidi — men, women, children — in order to back up the claim of genocide," Andrej Umansky, criminal law specialist at Cologne University, told AFP.

CNN said Yazidi women are "bought and sold for money, bartered for weapons, even given as a gift." But, the news organization added, "This is not a simple commercial transaction — ISIS has made rape and slavery part and parcel of its brutal theology."

The researchers have visited refugee camps to record interviews with Yazidis who have escaped. Umansky told AFP their "first aim is to stop this crime," although the tapes may be used for legal procedures in the future.

"Imagine if we had questioned the escapees of Auschwitz in 1942: reacting with legal procedures would not have been the priority," he told AFP.